Examination of Witnesses (Questions 100
- 119)
WEDNESDAY 23 FEBRUARY 2005
DR JOHN
HOOD AND
SIR ALAN
WILSON
Q100 Chairman: I would like to share
your optimism about getting a balance but the indications are
that we have maintained high quality undergraduate education in
this country so we are very attractive to mainland European students
who have English. Of course, they are more likely to have English
than most other languages. The United Kingdom is a very attractive
place to come. Should you not be, with your ministers, going over
to Europe, banging the table and getting some extra resources
from Europe about this?
Sir Alan Wilson: There are debates
in Europe at the moment about the funding of students, particularly
in relation to maintenance, as your Committee will be aware. The
so-called Bidar case is outstanding, which will not be resolved
until the spring. That will finally determine the obligations
on European states to fund EU students they receive from other
countries. At the moment, the situation is that EU students are
treated like home students from a fee perspective, not from a
maintenance perspective. We will have to see what happens in the
spring but I would be very happy to take back the issue of relative
funding and ask our ministers to explore that.
Q101 Valerie Davey: We visited Finland
recently. They were very happy with our three year courses, as
opposed to longer courses. They wanted their students to come
here but when I asked them about the repayment when the students
earned their equivalent of 15,000 they had no concept of how the
money might be paid back through their tax system. They had no
facility to operate so how are we going to get the fee back in
terms of earned income from those students in the future?
Sir Alan Wilson: From the department's
point of view and the Student Loan Company's point of view, it
is clearly an issue to be explored and developed and to be negotiated
country by country. We are in a position at the moment where the
Student Loan Company perhaps not surprisingly because it is easier
is used to being able to collect repayments from UK graduates
who have gone to European countries, but the situation you describe
is yet to be fully explored.
Q102 Valerie Davey: Can I suggest
that this was a question asked during the passing of the Bill
and we had a very robust answer at the time that this was fine;
there would not be a loss of income on this score and it would
all be returned.
Sir Alan Wilson: I think it is
the case that we would not be expecting that but let me perhaps
explore it and return to it on a future occasion.
Q103 Valerie Davey: I would be very
pleased because I think this is something that other people have
asked. Can I ask whether or not as a department you are disappointed
that we seem to be talking not, as we expected, about a market
and top-up fees but top-up bursaries? The variability is not at
all in the market sphere of the fee but in the bursary. Is this
what you expected?
Sir Alan Wilson: I would not say
we were disappointed.
Q104 Chairman: First of all, ministers
swore almost on the bible that this Committee was totally wrong;
of course there would be a whole variety of fees in the market
place and when I said on several occasions that they were all
going to charge £3,000 I was told I was talking nonsense.
Sir Alan Wilson: You may be proved
right for what might turn out in the end to be something like
85% of the system. There is at least one university as you noted
earlier that has announced a lower fee.
Q105 Chairman: Do they have the same
motto as these rhinos? Is it charge low and aim high?
Sir Alan Wilson: I will not comment.
Q106 Chairman: They were your colleagues
in Leeds.
Sir Alan Wilson: There is the
issue of the further education colleges, so there will be a significant
percentage of the system charging lower fees. There is some evidence
that there will be lower fees for foundation degrees. I am afraid
we are all going to have to wait until 17 March to hear the OFFA
report when they will publish their access agreements and at that
point we will have good data to work on.
Q107 Chairman: Was the bursary market
going to be the prime competitive area between universities? Had
you predicted that?
Sir Alan Wilson: It is certainly
not a surprise that it is a competitive area. I think it is quite
appropriate that it is. There is a £300 minimum. I do not
think there is any expectation that £300 would necessarily
be the norm. In fact, ministers gave indications at one stage
that different percentages were being quoted. It is the different
percentages that are now emerging. I think Dr Hood said perhaps
a third of Oxford's fee income might go into bursaries. That seems
to be true of a number of other universities. It is certainly
not necessary that more than 10% should go into bursaries. If
there is variety, my view is that if the variety is in bursaries
rather than fees, from a student's point of view it will still
give them a range of choice.
Q108 Chairman: You heard the earlier
evidence. Is it not a terrible penalty and burden for those universities
that are attracting students from much more diverse backgrounds,
from poorer backgrounds, have to face the fact that they are going
to have significant costs compared to Dr Hood's view where, even
with his best efforts, he is going to get a small percentage of
poorer students? Dr Hood, you are in a nice, comfortable position,
are you not?
Dr Hood: No, I am not and neither
is my university. The cost of what we do and the way we do it
is very high. We are looking at a shortfall on undergraduate teaching
of something north of £6,000 per student, per annum. Some
would estimate it as twice that. A system that effectively has
85% of its institutions gaining the same revenue but providing
very different services at very different cost levels is not a
sustainable system, I would maintain.
Sir Alan Wilson: On the question
of the fixed bursary, it was debated at length. There is an argument
that if there was a fixed bursary it would redistribute money
between different kinds of universities and that is partly why
the argument is in play now. I think ministers felt at the time
that it would be another level of interference almost in university
affairs because the student support had been determined with things
like the £2,700 maintenance grant for poorer students. There
was an argument for having a floor on bursaries but a strong argument
after that for saying that universities should make their own
decisions about bursaries. I am speculating simply from going
round the country talking to vice-chancellors who drop strong
hints about the kinds of bursary schemes they are tending to offer,
but I suspect we will find on 17 March that there is a great variety
of excellent bursary schemes where different universities have
gone for different ways of targeting groups of students. It may
be, for example, that some universities use bursaries to attract
more students into science courses. It may be that many of the
bursaries will be targeted on different widening participation
schemes. What we will see is a huge variety and I think that variety
will contribute to the good of the system.
Q109 Valerie Davey: It may contribute
to the good of the system but how are students and their parents
ever going to understand it when they have a particular course
they want and they have to go right round the country and say,
"What am I going to get in financial terms for that course?"?
Is that what we are laying out for students?
Sir Alan Wilson: It is partly
back to the supply of information again. We feel that the information
base for students will turn out to be rather good. It links to
the ability and the potential ability of the Student Loan Company
to offer to administer bursary schemes for universities which
is another issue in front of us. That is something which the Student
Loan Company is trying to deliver. If that, for example, took
off on a large scale, possibly in any case there will be good,
national directors, good internet portals that will give this
information.
Q110 Valerie Davey: The information
is financial, not necessarily linked to the quality of the course
or not necessarily linked to the need of the student to do a particular
course.
Sir Alan Wilson: I understand
and appreciate that question. Students will continue to make their
decisions on which course to take, which university to apply to,
on many grounds. There will be many factors: what subjects, what
universities, how far away, what kind of student support, and
bursaries will be part of that. One of the things that I am very
anxious to achieve in the admissions system for the future is
that when students make their choices they will have all the academic
information available to them. Professor Tarrant referred earlier
to the implementation of Sir Ron Cooke's report and that will
be implemented for 2006-07. If we manage to achieve what we would
like to achieve through the Student Loan Company, students would
be able to look at all the academic information with the possibility
of combining that because the Student Loan Company, if they had
early sightings of the financial situations of potential students,
would be able to give them advice not only on the government scheme
in terms of support but for the universities that the Student
Loan Company was servicing what was potentially available in bursary
support. The student should have, if we can get this right, a
whole set of information which embraces the academic, the geographical
and the financial before making decisions. That is our objective.
Dr Hood: This is tangential in
a sense but I think institutions have a particularly responsibility
here. You cannot rely entirely upon the department to provide
this information in a way which is incredibly helpful to those
whom we wish to consider coming to our institutions. In the case
of our own institution, we have designed special website access
with calculators and everything else so that students can determine
the level of support they would get alongside information on quality
and so forth. In our own case, we are taking what for Oxford is
quite an exceptional measure of a series of promotions that we
will run in the regions of this country, in the media and in other
forums, to try and ensure that as many people as possible can
see very clearly the nature of support that will be available
to them if they aspire to come to this university. We have to
learn from that and refine it as time goes on, but we do take
this responsibility very seriously and I am sure the other institutions
in this country do likewise.
Q111 Valerie Davey: Do you perhaps
now regret the capped 3,000 in real terms until the election,
after the immediate one? Does that not seem perhaps short sighted?
It was not me but those people who agreed with top-up fees said
it ought to be 5,000. Are you reflecting that the Committee in
its majority was perhaps right?
Sir Alan Wilson: I recall the
Committee's view. I was on record in an interview when I was first
appointed to this post, when I was asked this question, as saying
that it was obviously a very difficult judgment that the whole
community and Parliament had to make at that time. The judgment
was made and we now work with that, quite happily.
Q112 Valerie Davey: A Civil Service
answer.
Sir Alan Wilson: I do say to my
former vice-chancellor colleagues that I had a brain transplant.
Q113 Mr Chaytor: Dr Hood, a considerable
number of your students will have spent seven years of secondary
education in institutions where the course fee is about £20,000
a year. When they come to Oxford, the course fee is set at a maximum
of £3,000 a year. Coming in as a new vice-chancellor, if
there were not a piece of legislation fixing a maximum fee, in
view of what you said about your deficit on teaching, what would
the appropriate fee for undergraduate studies be at Oxford?
Dr Hood: They may be spending
£20,000 a year at the moment on seven years of secondary
education but it is important to understand that that is both
tuition fees and living costs. The £3,000 would have to be
added to the £5,700 to get an £8,700 comparator. If
one reflects on the debate that happened in this country last
year and the year prior, there were two important outcomes to
that debate. One was that the community more broadly started to
understand that if there is to be high quality tertiary education
available there is a private cost and private benefit from that.
There is a significant cost in the aggregate to providing it.
Institutions learned through that debate that if they are going
to have some latitude in charging fees at higher levels they also
have the obligation to put in place the support mechanisms and
bursary schemes such as to allow needs blind admissions. This
is not something that will happen overnight. We have devised what
we think is a generous bursary scheme, but we will doubtless have
to redesign it as we go forward and learn more about it. There
is a period in which we have to learn how to operate in this sort
of environment. I do not foresee that anyone would just march
in and suddenly say, "You are going to pay a very substantial
fee". We have to do this in an incredibly responsible way
such as to ensure that we are consistent with our principle of
wanting to have needs blind admissions and wanting to have the
most talented students from all over this country able to come
to Oxford.
Q114 Mr Chaytor: It is an interesting
answer but it does not answer the question.
Dr Hood: Because I do not have
an answer to your question.
Q115 Mr Chaytor: The question is:
when the cap is lifted, honestly, what do you think the appropriate
undergraduate fee should be?
Dr Hood: That entirely depends
on the other things I mentioned in answer to your colleague a
little while ago. It would depend, first of all, on what the Government
is going to leave in place by way of teaching and QR funding.
It would depend upon how successful we are in philanthropic activity
over that intervening period of time. We hope to be incredibly
successful and to fund fully a number of posts that way. I cannot
answer your question because there are too many uncertainties
in the equation. What I have said to you is that right now there
is a shortfall of the order of £6,000 plus per annum for
every undergraduate we teach.
Q116 Mr Chaytor: To eliminate that
shortfall, all things being equal, what would the fee have to
go up to?
Dr Hood: I cannot tell you because
I do not know what will happen with government funding.
Q117 Mr Chaytor: As of this year
with no change in the proportion of your income from benefactors
and no change in the grant regime—
Dr Hood: I am not prepared to
answer the question because it is not the environment we are in.
We would not do it because we would be responsibly moving to ensure
needs blind all the way, possibly to investing more in bursary
schemes as a proportion than we are, all this depending. There
are too many variables at play to give you a straight answer to
the question. I am sorry.
Q118 Mr Chaytor: If you accept it
is a difficult policy area and you accept it cannot be done all
at once, it follows that there has to be a gradual process of
raising the level of understanding. Is not part of that gradual
process giving people an indicative figure of what the fees would
be?
Dr Hood: I am sorry; I am just
not prepared to do it because there are too many variables at
play. I have tried to sketch out the range of variables that are
at play and it would be a responsible management of all those
variables that would ultimately end up with a range of answers,
I suspect, to your question.
Q119 Mr Chaytor: In 2009 would you
expect the fee still to be £3,000?
Dr Hood: It depends on what happens
to those other things.
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